The Canadian Pacific Railway
Employee SketchesBy Erick Middleton, July 1999

A couple of years ago while
browsing the Internet for history on the hotels that were owned and operated
by the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) I stumbled
onto the Canadian
Pacific Archives website. I did not find any information
on the hotels but did discover some images of sketches depicting employees
of the CPR that were produced on postcards. I was immediately attracted
to them because the detail of the subjects depicted looked so real that
they appeared to jump right off the card. I can think of no better
way of introducing you to these cards than quoting the text that appears
on the face of the cover card included in the series.

“One’s first thought of
a railway brings to mind parallel lines of steel tracks over which run
trains of passengeror freight cars drawn by a locomotive. Beside
the tracks are telegraph poles, and at intervals there are stations with
platforms. In some larger centres are roundhouses and railway shops."

“To run and operate this
equipment there is an army of employees with some of whom the traveler
comes in contact, though far more remain unseen by him except in
casual glimpses.”

“Within the sixty years of
its Charter, the personnel of the Canadian Pacific Railway has grown and
changed greatly. The number of its employees over the past few years, not
including those whoserve on its Trans-Atlantic and Trans-Pacific steamships,
has averaged between fifty and sixty thousand. The problem of making a
representative selection of portraits from these employees for a set of
pictures was quite a knotty one.

Miss Kathleen Shackleton,
the distinguished artist who undertook the job, limited her subjects mainly
to those who wore some kind of distinctive costume, even if it mightonly
be overalls, in the exercise of their craft, and was guided further in
her selection by representatives of the Railway Labour Organizations
and by officers of the operating department of the Company. Forty-eight
types have in this way been chosen, divided, for convenience in handling,
into two packages. So far as known this is the first attempt to present
in handy pictorialform the personnel of a great railway – which in this
case is the Canadian Pacific Railway, the greatest transportation system
in the world.”

These postcards were issued
in two sets of twenty-four cards each. A short explanation of the
subject’s duties appears at the foot of each portrait. The cards
were issued in standard size and the portrait of each employee was drawn
top-to-bottom along the long edge. (See some images of representative
cards appear at the end of this article.) All sketches appear to
be signed by the artist and many are also dated, either ‘1940’ or ‘1941’.
The publication date for this series was scheduled for October 20, 1941
but production delayed their introduction. They were eventually made
available before Christmas 1941 in time for employees to purchase them
as gifts. For the convenience of those who wished to see the whole
series a number of the sets were mounted on large cards and displayed through
the offices of the general superintendents of the CPR at places where railway
men were most likely to see them. They were also made available through
CPR restaurants and newsstands and through the General Publicity Agent.
The set of cards was first sold at 50 cents for the complete series.
Miss Kathleen Shackleton spent eight months, which included much traveling,
to get all these representative types.

Kathleen
Shackleton (1884-1961) was born in Dublin, Ireland and lived
in London, England. She was the sister of the famous Antarctic explorer
Sir Ernest Shackleton. She immigrated to Canada
in 1912 where she settled in Montreal and produced and exhibited numerous
paintings. She returned to England in 1916 and stayed until the late 1920’s
before eventually returning to Canada. She became known for her skillfully
drawn pastel portraits. Her sitters were people from all walks of
life and her clients came mainly from Montreal and the surrounding area.

Between 1930 and 1938 Shackleton
executed a series of cultural portraits which were used by the Canadian
Pacific to promote folkdance, folksong, and handicraft festivals.
Her portraits also appeared as illustrations in “Canadian Mosaic” – a book
written by J.M. Gibbon, general publicity
agent of the Canadian Pacific.

In 1937-38, on a commission
from the Hudson Bay Company (HBC), she produced
55 pastel portraits of people indigenous to northern Canada that are now
part of the HBC
Archives. (Some of these images can be viewed on
the HBC Archives website.)

In the early 1940s Shackleton
created a series of portraits of Canadian Pacific employees. The
portraits were exhibited in Montreal, Toronto, Edmonton, Vancouver, and
other Canadian cities.

Shackleton was an accomplished
artist, exhibiting on several occasions with Art
Association of Montreal and with the Royal
Canadian Academy. She also wrote articles, lectured and gave
talks on the radio. After a successful career in Canada, she returned
to England, where she spent the remaining years of her interesting life.

**********

It was very difficult to
find anyone who knew of this postcard series. But I continued to
look and eventually my hunting paid off. I have 38 of the 48 cards
in the set and also lack the cover card. They are extremely difficult
to find postally used because the employees, who presumably purchased the
majority of sets, kept them as souvenirs. A few months ago I again
browsed the CPR website, only to find that the images have been removed.
On a recent correspondence I learned that the some (and quite possibly
all) of the original sketches were given to the employee pictured upon
their retirement from the company. The biographical information on Kathleen
Shackleton came through correspondence with people found on the Internet.
Without the Internet I probably wouldn’t have discovered these cards nor
been able to share the facts about them with you. There are still
a lot of unanswered questions I have. Who was contracted to print
the cards? How many sets were sold? When did the CPR discontinue
sales of the series? Maybe the answers lie out on the Internet or perhaps
with a reader of this article.